Microsoft’s chief executive vowed last year to crush Google, the Internet search company, while a Google executive urged colleagues to pursue the hiring of a Microsoft employee “like wolves,” according to documents filed on Friday in an increasingly bitter legal battle. The allegations, filed in a Washington State court, came in a showdown prompted by […]

William H. Rehnquist, the 16th Chief Justice of the United States and a leader of the court’s conservative bloc for three decades, died Saturday evening at his home in Arlington, a court spokesman announced. Rehnquist, 80, has been undergoing treatment for thyroid cancer since October. His death creates the first vacancy for a chief justice

A federal judge in New York threw out the Securities and Exchange Commission’s lawsuit against Siebel Systems Inc., dealing a setback to regulators’ drive to ensure that companies share key information with all of their investors, not just favored clients and analysts. In the lawsuit filed last year, the SEC accused the software company, Chief

Shell has been forced to pay out $9.2m in legal fees and make changes to its corporate governance structure as part of a settlement with disgruntled shareholders. The case pending in New York and New Jersey courts followed the January 2004 statement from Shell that it had overstated its oil and gas reserves in filings

This year four new firms made it onto the American Lawyer’s list of the best of the best in U.S. law firms. Two of those, Weil, Gotshal & Manges (No. 20) and Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson (No. 17) made the first A-List in 2003 — but slid from the ranks last year. They

Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, like Sandra Day O’Connor, is polished and popular, with a warm plainspoken style and surprising pluck. When it comes to substance, however, the two have differences that will nudge the divided court to the right if, as expected, Roberts is confirmed to succeed the retiring O’Connor. The differences have been

Pretrial motions continued on Tuesday for the upcoming second product-liability trial involving Merck & Co.’s withdrawn arthritis drug, Vioxx, this time in a New Jersey state court. Jury selection for the new trial is scheduled to begin on Sept. 12 in the Atlantic City courtroom of Superior Court Judge Carol Higbee. During preliminaries on Monday,

Federal prosecutors have indicted eight former executives of the accounting firm KPMG on charges of conspiring to defraud the government by selling questionable tax shelters that deprived it of billions of dollars in revenue. The indictment, made public today in United States District Court in Manhattan, is a major step in the Justice Department’s criminal

Stanford Law Professor Jenny Martinez is just 33, yet she’s already stood before the Supreme Court to argue a case she is very passionate and very knowledgeable about, the case of “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla. Padilla, an American citizen, was picked up on May 8, 2002, as a material witness, while flying into O’Hare International

KPMG LLP will pay about $450 million and open up its operations to independent review as part of a deal with federal prosecutors to avoid a criminal indictment that could have sent the nation’s fourth-largest accounting firm into a death spiral, according to sources familiar with the pact. The deal, struck with the U.S. attorney